Croats have been living in Romania since the 14th century.
A small community of Croats in Romania, who will next week be visited by Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović as part of her official visit to Romania, is one of the oldest, and linguistically and ethnographically best preserved Croatian minorities in the world, reports tportal.hr on October 1, 2017.
Croats have moved to today’s Romania in the 14th century, and most of them live in seven settlements in the Karaš-Severin County in the west of the country, about a hundred kilometres southeast of Timisoara.
Throughout history, the Croats in Romania were known as Krašovans. According to the latest census conducted in 2011, 5,408 Croats live in Romania – the largest settlement of Romanian Croats is Karaševo, where about 3,200 inhabitants or four-fifths say they are Croats.
In Karaševo and the surrounding settlements of Lupka, Klokotić, Nermeta, Jablči, Ravnik and Vodnica, the Croatian language is present in homes and public use. The small Croatian community in this relatively isolated Romanian region is considered as linguistic and ethnographic one of the best preserved Croatian minorities in general.
The ancestors of these Croats settled on the plateau around the river Caras in the 14th century, and it is assumed that they came from northwest Bosnia or Turopolje. According to an Austrian census from the middle of the 19th century, about 10,000 Krašovans lived in the area of the Romanian Banat region. After the establishment of Croatian independence in the early 1990s, they started identifying as Croats in larger numbers.
President Grabar Kitarović will begin a three-day official visit to Romania on Monday, where she will meet with the highest Romanian officials in Bucharest. On Wednesday, she will attend the signing ceremony for the memorandum of understanding on the founding of Croatian language and literature department at a university in Timisoara and will then visit the Croatian community in Karaševo, Lupka and Klokotić.
The 1991 Romanian constitution allows members of the Croatian national minority in the country the right to protect, develop and research their ethnic identity, the right to education in the Croatian language, the right to a parliamentary representative, and the right to the official use of the Croatian language in courts.
In Romania, there are seven Croatian kindergartens, five primary schools from 1st to 4th grade, three primary schools from 1st to 8th grade, and one high school, which are attended by about 600 students in total. Since 1994, the University of Bucharest has offered the study of the Croatian language.
Croats in Romania are organised in two associations – the Croat Community in Romania with headquarters in Karaševo, and the Democratic Union of Romanian Croats with headquarters in Lupka – as well as in a number of cultural societies and sports clubs.
Translated from tportal.hr.
